©Cherríe L. Moraga, 2009

1

The Other Side of the Tracks

On Indigenous People’s Day 2003, my Mexican mother

announced to my sister that the Anglo man who had occupied the

other side of her bed for the last fifty-five years was not her

husband. She refused to sleep with him again. She did not know

who he was, she confessed, but she knew that she wasn’t “his

woman,” and he had no business in her bed.

My sister was stunned.

“Do you know who I am, Mom?” she asked.

“Yes,” she said. “You’re my daughter. I have three children.”

“But Mom, that man is our father.”

To which my mother replied, “He may be your father, but he’s

not my husband.” Then she added, not hiding her distaste, “How

could I have had children with that man.”

I write this remembering the fresh opening that was the wound

of my mother’s life at eighty-nine-years old: a worker-woman life

from California agricultural fields to Tijuana casinos to urban

assembly lines to suburban family kitchen and back to assembly

work again. It was so fresh an opening that I had no way to predict

how long this “delusion” might last or if the next day she would

wake up and suddenly recognize my father as her life companion.

That day, she did not and for many many days and weeks to

follow. That day she had exposed the benign emperor in all his

nakedness. This man was never her husband, she announced with

indignation to everyone – her daughters, her last surviving sister,

her doctor. She was done with the pretense.

©Cherríe L. Moraga, 2009

True to her conviction, my mother moved to the guest bed in

the back of their small bungalow home. “It’s the dementia talking,”

my father insisted. And, of course, it was. Still my sister and I

could not help but respond to the deeper message relayed in my

mother’s so-called “locura.” She was our mother, after all, flesh of

our flesh, our soon-to-be ancestor, our tribal leader, our once fierce

matriarch reduced to about six dozen pounds of bone hard fury.

As her Mexican female offspring, we saw in her the map of choices

that were drawn out for us, too. We saw in her the locations of

bitter regret we refused to inhabit and the places of the same that

we have inadvertently occupied in our own lives. She was our

mirror; that day, the carnival magic house kind—distorted and

exaggerated, and fundamentally marvelous. She offered hope for

change: that the human spirit really wants truth; that the human

spirit really wants freedom; that the human spirit speaks even

through a thick wall of dementia to remember the heart’s history

more profoundly than any chronology of facts of who married

whom and who begot what children. Maybe dementia really was

the gift of old age.

We began as a mixed-raced family of five, my parents and their

children; we three siblings born within a span of three years during

that boom of babies following World War II. For the next fifty

years, my mother who was eight years older than my father, would

serve as the planet around which all us and our near-hundred

relations, would hover like orbiting moons. What kept us all

gravitating to that sphere of my mother’s kitchen (aside from her

incomparable chile colorado) was the shared sense of Elvira’s

indefatigable capaz.

©Cherríe L. Moraga, 2009

Capaz, I write the word in Spanish because all that I understood

as able resided first in the Mexican body of my mother. She

remains for me, even in death, emblematic of the most foundational

set of values, which resided in the phrase, “No te dejes.” Do not

abandon yourself. Although not told to me in Spanish, it was later

I learned that so much of what my mother taught her familia were

translations from a worldview conjured from an invaded and

fractured México, but one which proffered the welded tools for our

survival in Gringolandia.

“No te dejes” didn’t keep me from “experimenting,“ as we

imagined ourselves doing during the liberation movements of the

seventies, but it did tell me when to leave the bar and the bed of a

batterer. It reminded me to step away from the cruelty of gossip

and to learn when to hold my own cruel tongue. It developed in

me a fierce judge of character, one as tough on myself as on others.

And finally, it made it very difficult to lie.

Those values have also served as the singularly most reliable

grounding point in how I raise—with my partner, Linda—her

granddaughter, Camerina, and my son, Rafael. More than a

decade ago, when my son was four years old and Camie, eight, I

came together with Linda drawn to the tale of familia rupture that

had shaped her. From the early loss of her mother, through teen

pregnancy, to the rough red road of raising children as a two-spirit

woman, I recognized in Linda’s aspirations for a restored familia

my own longing for the same. Linda’s values had been garnered

from the palabra y práctica of the Tepehuan Mexican grandmother

who raised her. As mexicanas of the same generation, my mother

and Linda’s grandmother unwittingly provided us with a common

site of ethics upon which to construct our queer familia. With

Linda’s three adult children, grown but not quite gone (some with

©Cherríe L. Moraga, 2009

several children of their own), and Camie and Rafa in tow, Linda

and I met and made home. At the age of forty-four, we began to

walk a road of contested mothering wherein the only guidepost

was the example of the abiding resolve of those two “old-school”

Mexican women who had preceded us.

Valores mexicanos.

Every thing about our upbringing as Mexican American

children reveres its elders. With elders, we learn to offer a glass of

water, a cup of coffee, the last empty chair in a room. We extend

our arm for them to hold as they cross a street, get out of a car, step

into a bathtub. With elders, we learn to refrain from comment

when we disagree, endure long hours of visita without asking to

eat, and never refuse what is offered to eat, no matter how stale the

saltines. With elders, we also learn that if we made ourselves

invisible enough, they may forget we are there and reveal all:

stories with the power to conjure a past as stained and shady grey

as the aging photographs that held them.

Elders were to be honored at all costs; so when was the cost too

high?

The San Gabriel of my childhood (and my parents’ forties and

fifties) was a typical of most suburban Los Angeles towns of the

1960s, constructed from the American optimism resultant from the

trauma of World War II and re-invigorated faith in democracy that

succeeded it. The Native origins of the region had long been

absorbed (close to extinction) into the culture of landless Mexicans,

who now resided on the other side of the tracks of Anglo-America,

©Cherríe L. Moraga, 2009

in the shadow of ever-expanding freeway interchanges. The dream

of Suburban America required its residents to believe that posted

city limits, railroad tracks, and tree-lined boulevards protected

them from the color of violence in the inner city. Throughout the

fifties, however, as Baby Boomers were being born and then

coming of age into the sixties, post-war hopes of social equality for

people of color had been dashed by the ever-vigilance of Jim Crow

laws in the South, rising urban poverty, the residual trauma of

Japanese American internment, and the ever heartless working and

living conditions of farm workers in California, Tejas and Arizona.

In the case of San Gabriel, “color” had always been there in the

Uto-Aztecan descendants, now carrying Spanish surnames on the

south side of the tracks. By the 1960s, those same Indians and their

Mexican relations from the south had evolved from filero-toting

“pachucos” of the forties to become khaki-clad “cholos” and

poured over the hills from East Los into the valle de San Gabriel.

Soon after, they—along with the working class catholic

schoolboys—started coming home in Army corps body bags and a

President and a Would-be President and a Baptist Freedom

Preacher and a Freedom Fighter and a Freedom Fighter and

another Freedom Fighter got shot dead and the suburbs, I came to

learn, would not protect us. But I learned that later.

In 1961, the anglicization of San Gabriel was still in full swing

when our family was the first of the Moraga clan to move there

(although we were not the first to bear that name in the region).

Landing on the other side of the tracks, but south of Las Tunas

Drive—the dividing line between us and the more affluent Anglo

homes to the north -- 205 Junipero Serra Drive sat in a kind of

holding zone between gringolandia and Mexican-Indian herencia

of San Gabriel. The main drag through town, Las Tunas Drive, in

©Cherríe L. Moraga, 2009

many ways reflected the fiction of the American dream, that the

culture of Anyplace America could be imposed upon a city without

regard to the history or culture of the majority of its inhabitants. In

the heyday of my childhood, Las Tunas Drive featured the

Edward’s Theater, where for a 25 cent admission ticket, I could cast

my pre-adolescent eyes upon Latina-esque Suzanne Pleshette’s

bold cleavage magnified on the big screen. Just down the block

from there was the Las Tunas Market, a three block three-times-aday

walk from our house, which my sister and I obligingly trekked

in errand for my mother or grandmother. There, would-be

boyfriends lingered on ten-speed or stingray bikes, straddled

across banana seats like wanna-be hells angels. The market was

eventually replaced by Julie’s bakery, which had come to replace

the Helmsman who had each afternoon delivered to the front of

our house chocolate dipped donuts and éclairs drawn from six foot

long drawers opening from the back of the Helms Bakery van.

I remember a Liquor Store on the same street, which survived

the closing of the market during my college years. There underage

boyfriends sauntered in without i.d. for a bottle of Annie

Greensprings, a cheap soda-pop wine that tasted like Kool Aid and

perfectly suited the taste and thin wallets of just-last-week Bubble-

Up drinkers. There was also the fast-food Tastee Freeze that was

not tasty, but provided for my brother the one job he had briefly

during high school. Then he gave up summer jobs altogether for

August football training and college scholarship aspirations. Just

down the street from the Freeze was the Ranch Steak House, which

we frequented on the very rare occasion of extra cash in the house,

and a Hardware Store where some forty years later I would buy a

galvanized metal tub in which to give my eighty-eight-year old

mother a bath. There was a local library, the size and prefabricated

look of a jumpstrip market, which provided my sister

©Cherríe L. Moraga, 2009

and me with infinite distraction during endless summer smogladen

months, coloring a new section of the mimeographed

bookworm for every book read. A block down from there stood a

pharmacist-owned corner drug store where I worked as a teen for

one dollar and fifty cents an hour when the minimum wage was

$1.65 (This is also where I snagged my first and only can of

spermicide foam, just in case the condom didn’t work).

Crossing city limits a few miles to the west, Las Tunas Drive

became Main Street, Alhambra. With a Woolworth’s five-and-dime

and Lerner’s dress shop, the twenty-five cent bus drive soon

replaced our trips to Main Street Downtown Los Angeles, where I

had, until the age of seven, held onto my mother’s straight-lined

skirt as we rode at a near ninety degree angle the famous “Angel’s

Flight.” A vernicular railway on Bunker Hill, it was leveled in

1969, as were most of the Victorian mansions in the area, to make

room for fifty-story glass high rises.

In short, as a burgeoning suburb of Los Angeles, life along Las

Tunas Drive and its environs was in many ways what it was

intended to be: ordinary, a kind of Anywhere USA. What was not

ordinary to me was that San Gabriel was to provide the final

stomping ground for that band of Mexicans—once espanoles, once

indios—that our familia would never be again.

From 1962 and for twenty-two years thereafter, México lived

next door to us in the body of my forever-aged grandmother. By

that time, Dolores Rodríguez de Moraga had already spawned a

full tribe of more than one hundred descendants, the majority of

which had moved to the San Gabriel Valley. Following her

daughter, Elvira, whose younger siblings had followed her in

pursuit of a more prosperous life, Dolores left a South Central Los

©Cherríe L. Moraga, 2009

Angeles already plagued by the inter-racial conflict – Black against

Mexican against newly arrived Asian immigrant – that still afflicts

it today. Grama had hesitated to make the move until that fateful

afternoon when poor eyesight reconfigured the light-skinned Black

man who entered her bedroom as her son, Roberto. Holding a

knife to her throat, he demanded that she not make a move, while

he ran off to the rest of the house to scavenge for cash and anything

of worth he could carry inside the deep pockets of his trousers. In

the meantime, my grandmother who was already in her seventies,

crawled through the open window of her bedroom and dropped a

full ten feet to the crabgrass beneath her, running to her youngest

daughter’s house for refuge.

Before San Gabriel there had been one more L.A. apartment

move to a courtyard of one bedrooms, surrounded by Chinese

immigrants who sang to their children from their one-step stoops

to call them in for evening supper. It was my first encounter with a

tonal language, the significance of which I did not understand until

some twenty-five years later when I would step off a bus into the

Yucatan and encounter the same in its very Asian looking Yucatec

Maya-speaking inhabitants. But the Chinese court was a

temporary stay until the Moraga-clan in one huge migratory wave

landed in the San Gabriel Valley.

Our San Gabriel Valley – Montebello, Alhambra, Monterey

Park, and of course, San Gabriel with the Mission and its Catholic

schools – became our own familial cosmos of first and second

cousins, aunties and uncles, ninas and ninos. To live in proximity to

my grandmother was to daily remember an América before Anglo

intrusion. Born in 1888 in Sonora, México, but baptized in Florence,

Arizona—the document of which she used as proof of U.S.

citizenship -- my grandmother remained faithful to her position as

©Cherríe L. Moraga, 2009

surviving matriarch of the family and to her Mexicanism until she

passed in 1984.

The México my grandmother brought to my daily life was one

of a Sonora Desert of covered wagon entrepreneurship and the

high dusty drama of an untelevised West. She riding shotgun

(without shotgun) at my Grandfather’s side, as they pull up into a

Yaqui pueblo, pots and pans and kitchen utensils clanking their

arrival. The Yaqui families sit silently in a circle around the

mestizo vendors. My abuelita grows impatient. “Vámonos, no

quieren nada,” she snaps impatient at my twenty-year old

grandfather. He urges her to wait and watch. Many long minutes

pass until at last one man stands and approaches the wagon.

Moments later, the whole community follows. Business was good

that day for the newly wed Moragas.

The México my grandmother brought to my daily life was the

length of her fingers threaded into the mouth of my anti-war folk

guitar. She sang songs I do not remember the words to now, her

voice a Chavela Vargas gravel as she plucked at the strings with

arthritic fingers having long lost the finesse of her girlhood

musicianship. Her family were músicos, she told me in her broken

English. And yes, once, I remember seeing such a family portrait:

the brass instruments resting across high-water woolen trousers,

violins pressed against proud chests.

The México my grandmother brought was of familial memory,

sleeping beneath the blond furniture headboard that held the small

retrato of her long-dead mother. At night with our evening

prayers, we kissed the pursed mouth of the small sprig of a

woman, clad in a black high-collared dress, a chonguito atop her

head. Bisabuela had died in her nineties as my grandmother would

in the decades ahead. My abuelita’s mourning of her mother had

©Cherríe L. Moraga, 2009

never lessened as I watched her become the same purse-mouthed

figure in the photo. The same figure my mother would assume in

the last months of her life. Me, too. I imagine. Me, too, one day.

In this world of extended familia – primos, abuelita, and tíos—I

remember the world of play. I remember “pertend games” and

smog and chlorine-filled lungs that ached with each full-chested

breath on the walk home from the city plunge. I remember peanut

butter and jelly sandwiches and concentrated lemonade from cans

and my mom at work in the electronics plant and long hours of

trying to find something to do. I remember the evercompanionship

of my sister and prima-hermana, Cynthia; Nino’s

small-sized Pizza for a $1.50 and RC Cola pints; going to Nam’s

Cantonese Restaurant, after collecting my Tía Tencha and mom

from a hour’s worth of Friday night paycheck beers at the Skip Inn.

Our heads pyramid style at the back alley screen door, my sister,

Cindy and I would peer into the smoky dusk of the afternoon bar,

trying to distinguish the silhouettes of our mothers. I always

checked the feet first. As our eyes adjusted to the dark, my Tía

Tencha’s iridescent feet would gradually come into view, propped

up upon the leg of a barstool, covered in her coveted aqua-colored

chanclas. She suffered from merciless bunions and after eight

hours of assembly line work, the fluffy pastel slippers became their

own kind of podiatric sanctuary.

They were hard working women who would wave us off with

“We’re just gonna finish this one last beer, mijitas.” And true to

their word, even when the beer extended itself into another, they

would finally emerge in good humor, smelling of hops and Salem

cigarettes and electronic wire.

©Cherríe L. Moraga, 2009

I remember working, too, hard with my hands, even back then

(as I do now) hammering and fixing, taping moldy tiles back up

onto the crumbling bathtub wall and kitchen sink. I remember

trying to please my mother. But mostly I remember feeling like we

were always just one step ahead of disappearance.

( . . .)